Who governs Mars? The answer is in a SpaceX filing, a 1949 novel and a terms-of-service page
A viral TikTok pointed to a clause in Starlink's terms of service declaring Mars "a free planet." The claim checks out: it's real, it's live, and SpaceX's own SEC filing shows the company means it.
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Article by Rebel News staff.
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: Starlink's terms of service call Mars a free planet, and SpaceX has told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Elon Musk's fortune turns on putting a million people there.
A viral TikTok pointed to Starlink's governing-law section, live on the company's website. "For Services provided to, on, or in orbit around the planet Earth or the Moon, this Agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Texas." Then: "For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement."
Space lawyers called the clause meaningless, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 appears to back them. Article II bars national claims on the Moon or any other celestial body. Article VI makes every country responsible for what its private companies do in space. On paper, Washington still answers for SpaceX on Mars.
This spring's SpaceX S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission tells a harder story. The board would grant Musk about one billion restricted shares, worth roughly $165 billion, vesting only if targets are hit: market value up to $7.5 trillion, and "A permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants." Investors are being asked to price a city on another planet. The Starlink clause was never really a legal instrument. It reads as a recruiting poster: a new world nobody owns yet, and an invitation to rediscover wonder.
Would a million people go? Nobody is lining up for Baffin Island or Antarctica, cold corners of a planet already mapped. Mars is the frontier mankind has not had in more than a century. Young Churchill chased adventure across India, the Sudan and South Africa. A few hundred misfits, schemers and dreamers sailed with Cortés. Ask eight billion people and a million hands go up.
By most counts SpaceX puts about 85 to 90 per cent of everything humanity launches into orbit. Remove Musk and China leads. In 2019 Beijing landed on the Moon's far side, a first. In 2024 it returned samples, a first America has never matched. In 2021 China put a rover on Mars, only the second country in history to do so. If the Chinese Communist Party would not love to plant its flag first and then write the rules, the Space Race is already into part two.
Musk's classified Starshield division builds spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office under a reported $1.8 billion contract, plus military communications for the U.S. Space Force. The question is which America shows up: the DARPA America that built the internet, or the one that in October 2016 under Barack Obama let U.S. oversight of the internet's naming system expire into a "global multistakeholder community." Britain signed a deal to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius for about £101 million a year by Parliament's own estimate, held only because Donald Trump called it "terrible." There is a suicidal gene in the liberal West, a reflex to give things away and apologize for having built them.
Once settlers arrive, who governs? Musk has said Martians should decide, favouring direct democracy and laws short enough for anyone to read. In 1949 Wernher von Braun, who later built America's Saturn V, wrote a novel about the first Mars expedition, published in English in 2006. In it, the head of the Martian government carries the title "The Elon." Musk's father says that is where the name came from.
The first wave will be brutally expensive: the rich, or people so valuable someone else pays their fare, engineers, doctors and pilots. That shapes a colony of astronauts, not tourists. Jeff Bezos's rocket last year lofted Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez for ten minutes and twenty-one seconds, a theme-park ride for billionaires. Musk's timelines slip. He put the odds at 50-50 on an uncrewed Starship to Mars this year, and it did not happen. He now talks of a Moon city in under ten years and Mars starting within five to seven. He is late on everything, and he delivers on everything.
None of Earth's inheritance waits on the Red Planet: no forests, oceans, cathedrals, common law or hockey rinks. The first child born there would, in one sense, be an orphan of the past, with everything made from nothing by the people standing there. If Musk pulls it off, he becomes the most consequential man since Columbus. The remaining question is whether a hand would go up for a seat, knowing a forest would never be seen again.
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COMMENTS
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Bruce Atchison commented 2026-09-29 20:41:48 -0400 FlagMartian colonies must be underground. Mars has no protection against solar radiation. And I think I’ll stay where I am. Living on Mars would be crowded and noisy. I love the countryside where I can sleep at night without ear plugs.
Remember the big lie theory? Say something long enough and people will believe it. That’s what’s happening with the U.N. -
Wesley Taylor commented 2026-09-29 20:13:03 -0400 FlagReally? I’m really sorry that so many people still believe in space travel and planets when it’s been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that it doesn’t exist “ NASA means deceiver in Hebrew and Space X is an absolute joke “😂 they’re duping the masses big time “but each to their own if you want to believe in it then that’s up to you 😌
